Email communications have become the preferred vehicle for businesses to send advertisements, marketing materials, and other information to their customers or potential customers. Such electronic communications make it possible to reach individuals all over the world in a short period of time. Current systems used by businesses for assembling and sending email communications utilize a singular, linear process that acquires a Send Job, divides the Send Job into multiple batches, and delivers each batch to a single worker thread, which creates the email message, injects the email to a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA), and records data about the send.
Because most email communications are time-sensitive, it is advantageous to be able to send the communications to recipients as quickly as possible so recipients of the same or similar messages receive the communications at about the same time. However, the current systems used by businesses for assembling and sending email communications to groups of individuals often are unable to rapidly send the communications because of bottlenecks in the assembly and send process. Even after the communications are sent, the communications themselves are sometimes rejected from being delivered to or otherwise reaching the intended recipients because of the design of current systems.
Additionally, the issue of consumer privacy is an ever-growing concern among consumers, lawmakers, and enterprises. Consumers are becoming increasingly sensitive about what consumer information is shared with third parties in order to effectuate marketing campaigns. Enterprises, with a concern over the security of customer information, expect to be able to use the services of third party email and messaging vendors without the need to disclose personal information to such third parties.
Various countries, jurisdictions, and associations have promulgated laws, rules, directives, and regulations directed to how personal information may be exported, stored, and otherwise secured. For example, in the United States, there are federal laws that specifically classify certain types of information as personal information and state how this information must be protected. The Gramm-Leech-Bliley Act, for example, protects personally identifiable information about consumers interacting with enterprises engaged in financial activities. Under this Act, enterprises must disclose what information is shared with third parties, and consumers must have the opportunity to opt out of such disclosure. As such, consumers may opt out from enterprises disclosing the consumers' personally identifiable information to third parties. In another example, in the United States, the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act requires covered entities to encrypt certain personally, identifiable health information.
In another example, the European Union through the European Commission promulgated the Directive on Data Protection, which prohibits the transfer of personal data of European Union citizens to non-European countries that do not meet the European Union adequacy standard for privacy protection. As such, enterprises doing business in the European Union may be barred from transferring customer data to other countries, such as for building and sending email messages and other correspondence to effectuate a marketing campaign.
The foregoing are only a few examples of rules, laws, guidelines, regulations and directives promulgated to protect personally identifiable information. The concern over the protection of personal data is increasing and new requirements will be established.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a system and method that can efficiently, reliably, and quickly assemble and send email communications to recipients. Moreover, there exists a need for a system and method that can efficiently, reliably, and quickly assemble and send email communications to recipients while protecting consumer information from third parties.